1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to accessing the world wide web and more particularly to a primarily audio environment for world wide web access.
2. Description of the Prior Art
The World Wide Web (WWW) is rapidly becoming the single most important source of information for businesses and consumers. With any source of information, a trade-off is involved between the value of information discovered and the opportunity cost of the time spent discovering it. Recent advances in technology, like the cellular phone, have helped people to improve the result of this trade-off, allowing them to better utilize time which would otherwise be unproductive, such as the time spent commuting to work, or exercising. The WWW, however, is difficult to use in such situations, because existing WWW browsers require significant visual attention and a high degree of interactivity.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a system which can access the World Wide Web in a situation where a computer monitor and/or keyboard are not readily available. The idea is to substitute audio playback for text and visual feedback, and to substitute physical manipulation of buttons and dials for virtual manipulation of GUI elements. Other systems, like Web-On-Call by Netphonic, allow similar functionality, but require extensive preparation at the server side. This means that users can only access the small number of servers which are customers of this service. It is an object of the present invention that the system is capable of doing all of its work at the client side, so users can access any web server.
Recently, a company known as The Productivity Works released a WWW browser called WebSpeak. This browser is intended for the visually impaired. Although this system includes large type and other visual features, it also uses text-to-speech synthesis to present HTML documents. The internal workings of this system are not known and no further information is available to the applicants at this time.